What do you like about your role?

I have several but I really love the part where I get to travel the world looking at best practices in Education Innovation. In the last 2 years, I have been travelling to a dozen of countries to understand how Edtech is adopted in a given region in regards to the local context and how it can scale.

With the Edtech World Tour, my colleague Audrey Jarre, want to promote global perspectives on edtech fuelled by local insights, bringing together major sectorial stakeholders beyond functional and geographical boundaries. We have been mapping edtech clusters and creating open-source resources for a refined understanding of the global ecosystem.

I’m now on a Edtech Europe Tour which findings I will present at EdtechX !

Share three predictions on the future of Edtech.

In the Future Edtech will support a more ‘human’ way of learning, enabling more human interactions and social, collaborative ways of learning

Edtech will also be about facilitating communication between the learners themselves, parents and teachers. Which is very important to make learning visible

Last but not least, Edtech (especially AI and algorithms) will allow us to personalize learning paths for every learner, and that’s by far the most exciting part.

What technologies do you believe have the potential to transform the education industry?

AI because it enables to personalize learning and this has the potential to truly disrupt traditional learning. Because every learner has different needs, strengths and difficulties and technology gives us the tool to differentiate learning paths, we cannot think of a standardized teaching and learning process anymore.

As we are celebrating out 5th anniversary of EdTechXEurope, we are looking at the key trends over the past 5 years in edtech. What would you say have been the key areas of change that are impacting edtech today? Anything unexpected that surprised you? Trends that were overhyped and never met their expected potential?

I think MOOCs were overhyped. They are amazing tools to bring knowledge to the many but in my opinion MOOCs alone are not suited for learning. We need to combine them with more practical stuff because we learn best when we do it ourselves, when we apply our learning and not by being passive in front of a video.

Why is it important for all players in the edtech ecosystem to continuously connect, network and learn from each other?

Because we can learn so much from each other! That’s also why we launched the Edtech World Tour: to share best practices around the globe with a global community of educators, entrepreneurs and thought leaders.

We can always benefit and learn from mistakes and get inspired by success stories even if those happen behind our borders in a completely different market.

When you think about joining EdTechXEurope this year, what are you looking forward to? What makes you excited about our event in London?

Looking forward to meet promising start-ups and meet the global and European Edtech community. I’m also very excited by the London Edtech Week and all the satellite events!

Join Svenja and our 100+ thought leader speakers at EdTechXEurope 2017 on 20 - 21st June 2017 - reserve your place now >> 

Explore the agenda and see all of our confirmed 2017 EdTechXEurope speakers - go to agenda >>